Election fever…
An election is a bit like Wimbledon. Everyone goes outside and bashes a ball against the wall for two weeks, gets bored, and leaves their freshly bought pair of white socks to gather dust in back of the garage. So, anyway, here’s me bashing the ball….
There will be post mortems galore come May 7th. That’s always the way it is. I suspect that even if Cameron break 40+ and returns triumphant, comfortable majority in tow, that the arguments will continue unabated. What did he do wrong? What did he say not enough about? What did he say too much of?
I’ll stick my neck on the line and say that 90% of what will be said will be nonsense. There is an elephant in the room; and it’s that people don’t quite believe in Cameron yet – and at this late stage they are not ever likely to.
There is a famous experiment which Malcolm Gladwell references in his book, Blink. In it, novices and food experts are given a series of jams to judge. Almost to a person, the order of preference come back the same. The power of our unconscious mind.
Yet when asked to rationalise why the choice had been made, not only were the novices incapable of doing so, but much more importantly they then completely re-ordered their choices as they rationalised a series of parameters and tests against which to judge the jams.
Ask an average voter if they believe in Cameron, and the response is likely to be negative, or at best, non-committal. Ask them to rationalise it, as journos and experts will attempt to do on their behalf, and people will struggle. He’s too posh, he’s too wooly, I don’t know what he believes in.
All sounds fine on paper, but they don’t answer the question at hand. These are simply plucked from the air justifications for their subconscious blink: there’s something about Cameron they don’t like. Rather like that jam.
So forget about Cameron the politician, what is it about Cameron the person people subconsciously are struggling to engage with.
My suspicion is that it all comes down to authenticity. And this is hugely important, because an easy take out from the above is that ‘likeability’ wins. Personality politics at its worst.
This isn’t true. Being believable isn’t necessarily being liked. The lack of fallout from Brown’s bullying claims show that the greatest threat to your poll ratings is not what you do, but how it differs from what people expect from you. Brown is dour, Brown is miserable, Brown is angry. But it’s authentic, and for that reason alone, it’s accepted.
So rather than ‘like’, let’s talk about ‘believe in’. People don’t believe in Cameron because their subconscious is picking up something from him which feels unauthentic. It’s that simple. If they believed in him, his public school background wouldn’t matter one iota (see Boris), if they believed in him, his presentational acumen would be viewed as charming (see Clegg), if they believed in him his lack of political detail would demonstrate vision (see Blair)
An individual’s blink is powerful. It cannot be fooled. The more you hide your true nature for fear of being judged, the greater you will be judged. The more you present a self which distorts true beliefs, the greater you will be judged.
Cameron is, for all his skills, painfully inauthentic. I cannot rationalise it, I cannot put my finger on it, but there is just something about him which feels wrong. My blink says so. As does, it seem, a vast swathe of the UK population.
Worryingly, nothing he can say or do shift this perception. This is not a matter of message, it’s a matter of self.
